Thomson

It’s a heck of a way to run a pre-election campaign. On the eve of an expected election, politicians usually spend their time playing up good news, downplaying the bad, shaking hands and kissing babies.

The Congo: No country for old men?

Few people travel to the DRC, but it's birding heaven for intrepid ornithologists

Street scenes in the Congo.

Photograph by: Sandy Ayer
, for Postmedia News

Why would three old guys, average age 61, spend two weeks birding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) when they could've gone to Costa Rica or Kenya and seen far more species? That's easy: they want to do something useful, rise to an age-appropriate challenge, and achieve immortality.

I meet my travelling companons in Kinshasa in mid June.

They're veteran Congo birder Dr. David O. Matson of Norfolk, VA; and Martin Bowman of Williamstown, ON, an old birding friend and the brother of famous NHL coach Scotty Bowman.

We spend the next morning at The American School of Kinshasa. A good chunk of TASOK 's forty-two-acre campus remains jungle, and so it's a good place to warm up for forest birding.

Despite reclusive birds, poor light, and few second chances (challenges we will have to contend with throughout the trip) we end up with a respectable 31 species, including a yellowcrested woodpecker.

A few days later we take taxis to Boma, a nine-hour drive to the west. We inch our way through shop-lined streets bustling with poor but colourfullydressed Kinois, and before long we're on the main highway.

As we slow down for the speed bumps in each village, children greet us with cries of "Mundele!" (white man).

Our only birding stop along the way is the world-renowned Kisantu Botanical Gardens.

Right away, we happen on a treetop gathering of large luminescent purple and green birds: splendid glossy starlings. With them are some forest chestnutwinged starlings. The flock disperses, and we begin hearing the morse-code-like calls of tinkerbirds. David searches through the West African bird songs on his I-Pod for a match - definitely speckled tinkerbird - and plays it through the speaker.

The normally shy bird perches in the open and starts singing at its "rival." Soon after, we hear yellow-throated tinkerbird, but the birding peters out quickly, and so we break for lunch.

In Boma, the staging point for our upcoming trip to the Luki Forest (a UNESCO biosphere reserve 20 kilometres to the north), we stay at FACTEB Seminary, where my friend Mabiala Kenzo is rector. Kenzo and I want to find out if FACTEB can increase its revenues by providing logistical support for ecotours, and so this trip is a sort of pilot project.

Meanwhile, we bird the hilly savanna around the campus. David finds a rufous-necked wryneck and Martin a red-cheeked cordon-bleu, neither of which, according to our field guides, is supposed to occur here.

Indeed, the DRC's birds are so poorly known that we stand a good chance of making significant sightings and of achieving "immortality" through a scientific article. We'd have no chance of that in Kenya or Costa Rica.

We spend the next several days conducting the first-ever survey of Luki's birds.

Our crowning achievement comes on our second morning. David stops us on a forested hillside.

"Hear that? Sounds like a thrush."

We remain silent and motionless as he tape-records the song. We then search our field guides for thrushes that might reside here. The most likely seems to be the rare black-eared groundthrush.

"Song unknown," say the guides. Only the call has been recorded.

For the next 15 minutes, David alternates between playing the call and the song he's recorded. Finally, the bird emerges. I get a two-second glimpse, noting the diagnostic parallel black smudges ("ears") below and just behind the eye.

David's recording may be a scientific first, although it will take time for us to get an expert judgment - how do you identify an unknown song? We take a GPS reading and then celebrate with high-fives and a group photo.

We return to Boma and spend the next afternoon as tourists.

Martin and I buy bolts of the colourful patterned cloth with which Congolese women fashion their dazzling outfits, and then we all visit the Stanley Baobab, a massive hollow tree in which the explorer Henry M. Stanley is said to have spent a couple of nights in 1877.

We end our day at the Auberge restaurant, which is built out over the Congo River on pilings. We order shrimp and a round of Primus beer, scan the river for birds, and find Congo martins skimming over the surface.

"Terns!" calls David, pointing to some dainty hovering birds silhouetted against the hulls of anchored freighters. They're either little terns or Damara terns. Neither should be here at this time of year.

The low point of our trip comes at the airport the next morning. The immigration officer discovers a "problem" with our visas: "I won't prevent you from flying to Muanda, but if you could think of me . . . ." He has our passports! Utterly powerless, we pass him an overly generous "thought." Once our anger subsides, we realize that the real culprit is poverty: our official probably rarely gets paid.

Our host in Muanda, Dr. Pierre Mavuemba, is a scientist and conservationist who's recently become a birder. To help him in his ornithological research, I've brought along equipment donations from the Calgary-area and pass them on to him - yet another purpose of our trip. I present him with a telescope with photographic adapter and tripod, a pair of waterproof binoculars, and a set of CDs of African bird songs.

During our five-day stay in Muanda Dr. Pierre takes us to various birding sites in the nearby Parc Marin des Mangroves. Together we develop a preliminary inventory of the park's birdlife.

We visit savanna, forest, and marsh habitats and see a number of article-worthy birds: Wahlberg's eagle, fulvous whistling-duck, spotted thick-knee (one previous record for the coast), and cape glossy starling (third record for the country!).

On our final afternoon we enounter a group of kids returnng from a soccer game.

Their team lost, they say, but only because the other team used a feticheur (witch doctor). Night falls as they leave us, and nightjars (the family to which nighthawks and whippoorwills belong) have already begun to call. We hear black-shouldered nightjar - it sounds like a car alarm going off - and have the thrill of seeing a square-tailed nightjar in flight.

On our last day in the DRC, David takes us to Livingstone Falls, spectacular house-high rapids that would capsize any whitewater raft.

Beyond the rapids on the far shore, about 700 metres away, he spots a shorebird preening and trains the telescope on it.

Even at this distance we can tell from the white stripe on its grey wing that it's a white-headed lapwing. I find an all-black stork. Its head and legs droop as it flies. The only possibility: African openbill. We also see grey pratincole, African pied wagtail, and African darter, the African cousin of the anhinga.

Buoyed by our strong finish, we do our final tally: 200 species, give or take a few - a mere fraction of the 1,141 (the most of any country in Africa) that have been recorded in the DRC.

We really must do something about that.

FOOTNOTE: The editor of Malimbus: Journal of West African Ornithology has just given us the green light for an article.

H.D. SANDY AYER IS DIRECTOR OF LIBRARY SERVICES AND ARCHIVIST AT AMBROSE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE/AMBROSE SEMINARY.

If You Go

- The Bradt Travel Guide. Democratic Republic Congo is indispensable.

- Contact person for the World Wildlife Foundation site at Luki Forest is Laurent Nsenga (lnsenga@yahoo.fr or lnsenga $30 per day room and meals, $15 per day for a guide (essential), $40 roundtrip pick-up and drop-off by WWF "taxi" in Boma. You will need to provide a research proposal in French (they'll provide a model; our proposal is available on request from sayer@ambrose.edu)

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.